Very few content marketers hit a home run each time they step up to bat. We’ve all had our fair share of strikeouts. Failures, however, are also learning experiences – especially those made by others. Mistakes provide insight into what to avoid in the future. As the content marketing space grows, so have the number of errors we’ve found many marketers make. Here are some of the most common mistakes we've seen brands make and how you can learn from them. 1. Not...

They don't go into bank branches. They use mobile phones (duh!). They want secure, easy-to-use mobile financial apps. They'll even change banks if your app sucks on either score.

OK, that's the summary. Now, from my article on why you should stop selling millennials, go find something you like to do that dovetails with what millennials tend to like to do so you remember that they're people, not purses. Do that for all your audiences while you're at it. Respect them, don't sell them.

Brand marketers are shifting their focus away from traditional digital metrics like the click and toward new metrics such as attention.

How did we get here? Virtually every year there has been some sort of innovation: new ad sizes, formats, functionality, targeting and re-targeting techniques and programmatic buying methodologies. We have seen quite a transformation from the day the first 468x60 banner ad was put on a website and the user was encouraged to click.

A leader’s most precious resource is not their time. It’s their focused attention. Time merely passes, while focused attention makes things happen. When we’re able to gather and direct our attention toward a particular task or interaction, we can have a significant impact in a minimal amount of time. But when we’re unable to bring our attention to bear on the work at hand, all the time in the world is insufficient. So what are the implications of this for leaders?

Leaders must recognize that it’s essential to work at enhancing their ability to direct their attention and minimize unhelpful distractions, and one of the most important steps in this process is managing emotions. Psychologist Victor Johnston describes emotions as “discriminant hedonic amplifiers,” meaning that they boost various signals in our mental landscape, drawing our attention toward certain issues and events and away from others. In other words, emotions are attention magnets.Consequently, awareness and regulation of our emotions are central to the productive use of our attention. Here are some practical steps leaders can take.

Build Capacity. We can expand our attentive capacity through a commitment to practices such as meditation, journaling, time in nature, regular physical activity, and good sleep hygiene. All of these activities support our ability to direct our focus, filter out distractions, and manage our emotions, and we can often realize their benefits with a modest investment of time. Recent research indicates that meditating for just a few minutes a day, spending just one hour a week in nature, or jotting down a few reflective notes in the evening has a noticeable impact on well-being. My experience as a coach suggests that these benefits extend to leaders’ effectiveness. The key is a consistent commitment to each daily or weekly practice.While these activities are often enjoyable in themselves, they aren’t indulgences–they’re investments in our ability to operate at peak effectiveness. High-performing professionals often enjoy success early in their careers by virtue of their ability to forego activities like this–they cut back on sleep or go without exercise for extended periods of time. But while those sacrifices temporarily expand our capacity for throughput, they actually diminish our capacity for focused attention. And while more senior leaders like my clients continue to work hard, what allows them to add value isn’t the extra hours spent working, but rather the quality of their focused attention while they’re at work.

Plug Leaks. Attention is finite, and our ability to focus in the moment is severely limited. Because distractions can fatally undermine effective leadership, it’s critical to avoid “attention leaks.” As I wrote a few months ago, “The functions on our phones and other devices that beep, blink and thrust red numbers in our faces are designed to capture our attention and create a sense of urgency… But how often are any of these interruptions truly urgent? Almost never. Turn them off.”Another attention-destroying practice is what we’ve come to call “multi-tasking,” an utterly misnamed concept. While insignificant tasks requiring minimal cognitive effort can be performed in parallel, the truly meaningful work through which most leaders add value–one-on-one conversations, facilitation or decision-making in meetings, and creative thought and ideation–require a much more intense level of focus. Multi-tasking in those environments inevitably results in significant inefficiencies as we switch contexts and lose focus before returning to a deeper level of thought.

Create Space. Leaders typically face intense demands on their time (in part because everyone wants their attention), and if they’re not careful they can find themselves booked nonstop for days on end. It’s important to maintain some open space in the calendar, on a weekly or even daily basis, which allows for more creative thinking and helps replenish our stores of attention.This inevitably involves disappointing people, all of whom believe their issue is worthy of the leader’s time, but productive leaders realize that they can’t meet all of these requests and must ignore many of them. Here leaders require help from their senior team, family, and friends, and–perhaps most importantly–their executive assistants. People in these roles are uniquely positioned to help leaders protect open space on their calendars, and they’re uniquely positioned to undermine that process if they don’t understand this responsibility.

One final thought: If you’re a leader sitting in a meeting that’s not worth your focused attention, then you’re serving a theatrical function. Sometimes this makes sense. There’s a place for organizational theater. But more often the whole organization is suffering because your most precious resource is being wasted. Let the people who organized the meeting know that you’ll attend in the future when you’re needed, excuse yourself, and get on with your day. And if it’s your meeting, then you may well be wasting everyone’s time and attention–they may all be there in a theatrical function because they’re deferring to your authority. Have a candid conversation with a trusted ally, and get some feedback on the utility of your meetings.

What’s the best way to raise brand awareness and position yourself as a leading expert in your industry?

It’s a question marketing departments have been attempting to answer for decades. Some spend hundreds to millions of dollars on local or national print, radio, or television ads to reach a mass audience. Others send employees to trade shows and conventions to make business connections one handshake at a time.

There are as many definitions of the digital workplace as there are organizations. But in light of this month's focus on the digital workplace, it could be useful to look at what a digital workplace is, and clarify some of the things that it is not.

Interesting article for those who are moving into working digitally. A key factor in implementing the digital workplace will be the digital literacy skills of employees, which are also generally seen by many as critical to economic growth of the UK. Is enough being done to develop young people, the workforce of the future, with the digital skills they need?

I don’t like to dwell on mistakes. But having an awareness of our mistakes is one of the best ways to improve our future behavior. In the rapid-fire industry of social media marketing, mistakes are some of the greatest tools for improvement that you have.

This article focuses on the mistakes that a business can make when creating a social media site. The author explains that the point it to improve sites. there is a list a 9 tips. these tips are all things that would make a site better and if a business could improve on all of them then they would pretty much be perfect.

I agree with all of these mistakes. a lot of them deal with the type of content. If its too much or too little, if there’s no theme, not providing a right hook etc. I think that content is one of the most important aspects of having a social media site. The content is what will interest the users to keep coming back. Like Vaynerchuk says you need to hit them with a few jabs first to get their attention and then throw them the right hook so that they will be encouraged to buy whatever product or service the business is selling. I also thing that doing too much is also a mistake when sites become spammy they are ignored or even hidden form view because they annoy people. A site must reach a happy medium of content to satisfy users.

More than one-third of consumers (37%) say they most often abandon an online shopping cart because they decide at the last minute that the purchase is too expensive, according to a recent report from Offers.com.

The second most common reason for not completing an online purchase is finding a better price on another website (cited by 24% of respondents).

Some 12% of consumers surveyed say they most often abandon an online shopping cart because they cannot find a coupon code; 7% say they often abandon carts because they are confused by the checkout process.

Just 20% say they almost always purchase the items they put in their online shopping carts.

With all the talk of "The Internet of Things," and the rapid advances we're seeing with all-things web, smart devices and hyper-connected world, we found this Infographic goes a long way to tell the story.

Getting a good overview of the capabilities for reaching the right audience on Facebook can be a bit tricky. The alternatives seem endless, which is a good thing, but also adds to the confusion regarding what the best options are. Having recieved hundreds of questions on this topic from advertisers usingQwaya, we decided to put together an exhaustive overview of all the options advertisers currently have when building a target audience on Facebook.

Your ability to influence others is directly dependent upon how credible you seem. If meeting attendees don't perceive you as intelligent, competent and trustworthy, they'll want to do business with somebody else.

With that in mind, here are nine common meeting-room behaviors to avoid.

If the customer journey is a life cycle, what are the best practices in maintaining relationships after the sale? Read on for the 9 Immutable Laws of Customer Renewals!Renewals must be a key priority for any B2B organization.Renewals, especially for B2B organizations, can’t be taken for granted. The amount invested in acquiring each customer just means there is too much at stake. Renewals need to be treated with the same respect and gravity as sales. Greg Poirier, Owner, Poirier Technolog

1. Renewals must be a key priority for any organization.2. Customers renew best when the product value is crystal clear.3. Customers make renewal decisions differently than initial purchase decisions.4. Aside from the product, an appropriate customer experience is a key factor in renewing business.5. Measuring customer health improves customer experiences.6. Communicating proactively is great medicine for customer health.

While this piece is largely about B2B product customers, it's all applicable to any business-buyer relationship.

The article makes a lot of salient points, like, "the decision to renew is based on customers’ actual experience working directly with your product in their organization." You may say, "Well duh!" when you read that statement, but how does your organization approach repeat sales? Just like initial sales? Something to think about!

In the ten-plus years I've been writing about neuromarketing, I've bemoaned the lack of serious academic research into the various neuroscience-based techniques used to evaluate ads, products, brand attitudes, and so on.

Just look at the image above. It shows that Google drives 40.51% of the traffici to Quick Sprout.

So, how do you ensure that your blog is optimized for search engines… other than just installing the Yoast SEO plugin? All you have to do is ask yourself the following questions before you publish your next blog post.

Inbound marketing, on the level it's done today, just wasn't possible prior to the digital age. Technology was the key limitation. Advertising on TV, or in your local newspaper, for that matter, had to paint in broad strokes. You could look at demographics and do your best to plan, but ultimately you had no way to connect with customers individually.

Facebook, Google and Twitter have brought consumers closer to brands than ever before. And as people shift their relationships with brands, the processes that link customers with brands and their cultures are also changing.

"At a recent event hosted by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists got together with film makers to discuss what both groups have learned---the scientists through painstaking experiments and ..."

Which means data never sleeps, and the internet sure likes to use up a lot of it. How much? In any given minute, 277,000 tweets are published on Twitter, 216,000 photos are sent to Instagram and 8,333 videos are shared on Vine.

And we’re just getting started. Over that same 60 second period, 347,222 photos are sent on WhatsApp, 416,667 swipes are made on Tinder and 3,472 images are pinned on Pinterest.

And if you think that’s impressive, Google receives 4 millions search queries, Facebook users share 2.46 million pieces of content and 204 million email messages are sent each and every minute of the day.

This visual from DOMO looks at how much data is generated every minute across the net....

The hard truth about creating content online is the amount of time you put into it isn't always proportional to what you get out of it. We all hope that everything we do is a grand slam resulting in traffic, leads, and reporters clamoring to talk to you.

But that's not always what happens.

Luckily, there are few things we can do to infographics to hedge our bets a bit. So, we put together the following infographic on making highly shareable infographics -- helping you rake in more views and conversion opportunities. Follow these tips, and your infographic will be much more likely to get shared.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.